The Fallout From Wen Jiabao’s Family Fortune

The fallout continues from the Times investigation of China’s Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, which found that his relatives have acquired a fortune of $2.7 billion during his time as a public servant. The Times remains blacked out in China, and the report has kicked up a range of interesting questions about corruption, conspiracies, and diplomacy:

• Lawsuit? Don’t count on it. Lawyers hired by the family (reportedly, his son, the prominent investor and executive Winston Wen) issued a statement that disputed that the Prime Minister’s ninety-year-old mother held about a hundred and twenty million dollars worth of shares in Ping An, an insurance company, through investment vehicles. The Times stands firmly by the story, noting that “a signature bearing her name and her government-issued identity card were included in the registration record, which was obtained from government regulatory filings.” The statement dropped hints of future legal action, but I find that unlikely for precisely the reason that the story was published at all: China’s leading families do not like airing their financial details, so the prospect of them sitting for depositions, and submitting details on their finances, and stirring up a far larger round of investigative reporting, is hard to picture. But stranger things have happened, and the lawyers’ statement was hasty and odd enough—as the law professor Don Clarke points out, it denied things that nobody had accused—that one never knows.

• Conspiracy? Give me a break. One of the most surprising things to come out since the piece ran was a range of suggestions that the Times is part of a vast conspiracy. In a Q. & A. with readers yesterday, the reporter David Barboza was asked whether he “ever got a feeling of being used,” whether the “New York Times has become a tool in a factional struggle” and, indeed, whether the Times received “a thick bundle of material about Wen’s family wealth by unidentified parties.” The inside-baseball implication is that one of the Prime Minister’s enemies, perhaps the family of the ruined former star Bo Xilai, who is soon to go on trial for corruption, handed a dossier to the Times and then dutifully printed it. To anyone who has ever tried their hand at investigative reporting the actual mechanics of it are far more banal, but I’ve been struck by how many seem willing to imagine it. Part of that is projection: Many of the people most interested in this case are have enough connection to China to bear the scars from factional struggles of China’s recent history, in which the press was routinely enlisted to unleash attacks on one or another politician. Another reason is that Wen Jiabao has not been thought to be the most corrupt man at the top, so some have read dark designs into the Times’s choice to investigate him and not others. The explanation is more prosaic. Why focus on Wen? Because you can’t do everyone at once, and he is, after all, the Prime Minister. Moreover, his family has been dogged by rumors for years. But one thing is for sure: now that this brand of reporting has proven productive, we can expect that other news organizations will begin to widen the focus to other figures.

• A Diplomatic Issue or a Personal Issue? What began as investigations into individuals is edging toward a diplomatic issue for China and the United States. China’s response has hastened that process substantially. After the story came out, China’s foreign ministry could have brushed it off as a private matter surrounding Wen’s family, or even defended the Prime Minister by standing up for his probity and virtue. Instead, the spokesman said that it “smears China and has ulterior motives.” To be precise, the story never made assertions about China, until that statement linked Wen Jiabao’s relatives to the national image. To make things more complicated, China has now blocked two major American news organizations (Bloomberg has been blacked out for four months, after a similar story on the incoming President, Xi Jinping), without official explanation. They are large American businesses, with substantial financial investments associated with their operations in China. At a certain point, the United States Embassy will have to weigh in, which will only ratchet up the pressure.

• Not Surprised by This Story? Perhaps you should be. One of the standard lines going around in recent days has been the notion that this subject is somehow old news, that people already “knew” that Chinese leaders benefit from public office, so why bother? To me, that’s akin to saying that since we “knew” that campaign finance corrupts American government, we shouldn’t have bothered to unearth the crimes of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff; and since we “knew” British tabloids would walk a fine line to get a story, we shouldn’t have gotten so exercised about digging out the details of phone-hacking and the paying of police for information. In the end, that’s the nature of investigation: it puts details on what we don’t know but think we do. Sometimes the conventional wisdom is right, and sometimes it’s wrong, but you never know until you look. Corruption in China, after all, is hardly a scoop in itself. Lin Yutang, for one, wrote, “In China, though a man may be arrested for stealing a purse, he is not arrested for stealing the national treasury.”

He wrote that observation in 1935.

Photograph by Lintao Zhang/Getty.

Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and covers politics and foreign affairs.